Dime Detective Magazine June 1942 by Paige Peter & Dana Jan & Constiner Merle & Reeves Robert & Dermody Richard

Author:Paige, Peter & Dana, Jan & Constiner, Merle & Reeves, Robert & Dermody, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Pulp
Publisher: Dime Detective Magazine
Published: 1942-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

3. Murder in Trust

We’d been on the case for maybe a little better than two hours and already I felt like an octogenarian. You can’t traffic with goofy people and not have it bear down on you. That is, I can’t. The Dean was as blithe as a mating nightingale. “It marches,” he purred. “Go to our apartment and hold down the office until I return. And be watchful. We may be having energetic company.”

“Where you bound for?” I enquired.

He clucked a disapproving tongue, shook a finger at me and, before I could comment, disappeared into the night.

I really didn’t expect an answer. It was a custom of his, whenever a case began to hit the grade, to go off by himself on a solitary scouting expedition. It was his established habit, day in and day out, to pass out obscure monetary favors—a fin to a busboy or maybe a sawbuck to a hard pressed janitor; he ran sort of a one-man charity organization. When he needed information he’d make the rounds. It was surprising the nature and the scope of the tips he’d pick up. He used to say to me, “Ben, it’s the little people that serve mankind, the people who hand you things, and take away things—the people whose faces you never remember. It’s the people that serve you who really rule you. They know you like the palm of their calloused hands. Do you know them or remember them?”

He’d come back from these voyages bright eyed and tight lipped. Dynamite couldn’t blast a giveaway from him. When a thing was told to him in confidence he kept it in confidence. That was the way he had built up a cross index file of human minds that covered every phase of the city’s multiplex life.

Everything would have been all right, I guess, if I hadn’t gotten the sudden urge to show off. There was something about working with the Dean; he was so chaotic in his methods and yet so flawless in his results, that it made you want to prove to him that you had something on the ball yourself. He had one hard and fast rule: free lancing on my part was strictly taboo.

I had a hunch and the way I figured it—if nothing came of it, O. K. He’d never hear about it.

That’s what I thought.

My idea was to cut the trail of Jackman, the Fell handyman. He looked mighty like an habitual to me—and I had a few contacts of my own. He shouldn’t be so tough to trace. I decided to drop in on the Pin-Setter.

The Pin-Setter kept shop in a gloomy, musty Drury. He was a disbarred attorney and his moniker came as a tribute from the underworld. The word was that if the law knocked you over, go to the Pin-Setter and he’d put you on your feet again. His specialty was legal papers—cracking partnerships and contracts, voiding wills and finagling bonds. He was a rat from his shoe laces to his hat brim.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.